θάλασσα

θάλασσα (thalassa, "THAH-lah-sah"), the sea, lives in this corpus squarely in the hands of the historians: 1,474 occurrences across 117 works. Herodotus's Histories leads with 229, then Thucydides's History with 183, Xenophon's Hellenica with 86, the Odyssey with 78, and Xenophon's Anabasis with 62; Ezechiel ("Ezekiel") carries 55. This is the sea as the medium of Greek life — the thing fleets cross and empires contest — and the record shows it doing that work most of all in narrative history.

The lexica record the word's sense plainly. LSJ (Liddell–Scott–Jones, 1940) shows it doing every ordinary job: the sea, a salt lake, maritime affairs. Chantraine (Dictionnaire étymologique de la langue grecque, 1968–80) gives it as the general Greek word for the sea, from Homer through modern Greek, and notes the Attic form θάλαττα (thalatta, "THAH-laht-tah"). Beekes (Etymological Dictionary of Greek, Brill 2010) glosses it "sea" and records that the word has dialect variants.

Here Beekes's judgment is the quiet remarkable thing the record holds. The doubled consonant and the shape of the word mark it, in his view, as Pre-Greek — non-Indo-European in origin, a word the Greeks did not inherit but took over from the older, unknown language of the Aegean they arrived into. The people whose history the record shows happening on the water may have had no word of their own for it, and kept the name the sea already had.

One cited surface reaches outside that historians' world: the dative θαλάσσῃ (thalassēi, "thah-LAH-say," "in the sea") appears in the New Testament, at 2 Corinthians 11.25.

If the Greeks took the name of the sea from whoever was there before them, whose sea were they crossing?